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Comment by thewebcount | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, same here. And even when it's a processor I know like Stripe, Square, or Shopify, I don't really trust those companies very much. I've gotten spam, other people's receipts, etc. from them and their tech support is horrible for the consumer. And if they aren't a name I know like one of the above, I'm really leery of giving them my email and credit card info!

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While I am skeptical of cryptocurrencies, more and more often I catch myself thinking: I wish this seller just accepted bitcoin or something. I want to make a transaction and be done with it. I don’t want my email and credit card number end up anywhere long term.

There was a lunch place near my work that I frequented. They used Square POS terminal, once I noticed that it somehow linked my email to my credit card, I started using cash to pay. Cash is horribly inconvenient and gross to handle, but at least once you paid you don’t need to worry about it. You can’t be hit with some unexpected charges, wait to check the transaction when posted, no possibility of data leak, no privacy concerns, etc.

Wasn't ApplePay supposed to address this? Each transaction creates a one-time-use number which is the only number the seller receives. It would no longer be valid if evilHacker(TM) tries to use that number for a fraudulent charge later.

At least in the UK, Monzo Bank gives me the ability to create and tear down virtual debit cards that I can name and use to individually identify which card I used. Each is complete with a CVC number.

It's not one time unless you want to do the setup and teardown for every purchase, but the £15 monthly fee includes phone and other insurance and the app exports your account ledger to Excel and CSV. Customer service and vanishing transactions from the app ledger have been worrying me but I was promptly put in touch with management as soon as I dusted off a smidgeon of English idiomatic equivalents to "wtf" and this seems to have been caused by Transport For London running adjustments for the daily Oyster journey payment limit (via taking a holding charge placeholder payment in the way hotels ring fence for your stay on debit cards) so the final amount is adjusted the following day to enable the 0400 end of their day.

So in 2020, in order to allow the employees to keep banker's hours and go home indecently early, they put a hold on a card so an employee can finalize the transaction the following day rather than just letting the computers handle the transaction to completion? How/Why is this still a thing? Just like why does depositing a check have a hold on it when the computer can quite easily check that the money is available for withdraw, and then move it to the depositor's account?

The entire banking industry is so ripe for re-imagining, yet their strangle hold onto the old ways is super preventative from us evolving as a species.

0400 is 4AM, not 4PM, and has nothing to do with banking hours.

4am is the cut off time between “days” for TFL (London Transit) services - if you buy a ‘day travelcard’ it is good until 4am the following day.

It is guaranteed that if you make several transactions in the same day on TFL (by swiping in/out with a contactless card - or an Oyster card - at the ticket gates), the amount paid will be capped at the value of a day travelcard. I’m quite sure no employee is involved in any of this, and computers handle it end-to-end.

Banking in the UK is actually quite reasonable - largely because companies like Monzo have pushed it forward.

It’s a constant surprise to me quite how _bad_ banking in the US is in comparison though - and most of your points seem to reflect how US banking works rather than UK banking - as indicated both by the spelling of “cheque” and the notion of using them in the first place.

Same here. The last time I bought software that wasn't thru a well known store or processor I ended up with some fraudulent purchases on my next credit card bill[0]. Since then, I'll never do that again.

[0] - Thankfully my bank handled this without issue.

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